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Description
Session Description
This session will present recent developments in providing rich media feedback (audio, screencasts and video) on assessed work for students, across a range of disciplines at “our Institution”. It aims to report on an area of emerging practice that has been enabled by a recent investment in a new media hosting and delivery platform.
Students’ satisfaction with assessment and feedback has been a concern to the sector for a number of years now, and institutions across the sector have invested huge amounts of effort in trying to address this (Ferrell 2012). Typically scores for these areas in surveys such as the National Student Survey, are noticeably below those for teaching overall. Rich media feedback has offered great promise in enhancing students’ learning, since early pilots from 2008 onwards, by increasing the value of feedback students receive. (Crook et al 2012)
Previous studies have noted that students typically respond very positively to feedback provided via rich media, and typically the perceived benefits of this include better understanding of marker’s comments, greater quality and quantity of feedback, and that feedback feels more personalised and meaningful to the learner (McGregor et al 2011, Parkes and Fletcher 2017). At our Institution however, we have until recently lacked the infrastructure to support providing rich media feedback in an easy and scalable manner, with workflows often being ad hoc and complicated, and with no integrated system to help manage this (ibid).
Recent changes in the learning technology landscape at xxx, with the introduction of a new digital media platform, have enabled teaching staff to easily create rich media feedback from within our virtual learning environment, and deliver this directly to students in an easy and efficient manner. This enables the provision of such feedback as part of the broader electronic management of assessment (EMA) lifecycle.
This session will provide the background and context to this work, along with presenting examples of how it has been used in three departments across the University, each one looking at different types of assessment. The session will also present informal feedback from learners in these departments.
Although the evaluation with students has been informal so far, it is highly consistent with that found in the previous studies above. We also present the perspective of our teaching staff, who feel that the affordances of creating this kind of feedback, are also arguably more consistent with the types of work being assessed, e.g. for assessing video production by journalism students, or graphically presented architectural schemes, as well as more traditional written work.
The session will be of value to teaching staff who need to provide feedback on assessed work to students, and those colleagues who support these, including administrators and learning technologists. It will also be of interest to those in management and leadership roles, so as to understand how this can enhance assessment and feedback practices on strategic and programme levels.
References
Crook, A., Mauchline, A., Maw, S., Lawson, C., Drinkwater, R., Lundqvist, K., … Park, J. (2012). The use of video technology for providing feedback to students: Can it enhance the feedback experience for staff and students? Computers & Education, 58, 386–396. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.08.025
Ferrell, G (2012) A view of the Assessment and Feedback Landscape: baseline analysis of policy and practice from
the JISC Assessment & Feedback programme. Published by JISC and now available at
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140613220103/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/Assessment/JISCAFBaselineReportMay2012.pdf
George Macgregor, Alex Spiers & Chris Taylor (2011) Exploratory evaluation of audio email technology in formative assessment feedback, Research in Learning Technology, 19:1, 39-59, DOI: 10.1080/09687769.2010.547930
Mitchell Parkes & Peter Fletcher (2017) A longitudinal, quantitative study of student attitudes towards audio feedback for assessment, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42:7, 1046-1053, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2016.1224810
